AMD’s Bulldozer and Bobcat
AMD’s biggest announcement was probably the “Bulldozer” and “Bobcat” platforms for different parts of the market AMD now addresses. These are completely new CPUs/platforms that we probably won’t see until 2010 and later.
The “Bulldozer” CPU core will be targeted at servers and clients (that’s us) and will be a ground up design from scratch. Their goal is obviously to focus on performance-per-watt while continuing to increase single threaded performance. It’s a pretty bold claim to say it is the “highest performing single and multi-threaded compute core in history”.
And while AMD us to say before that they wanted to have a single CPU design for ALL levels of usage including the super-low-wattage consumer electronics and up to the high-performance computing servers, that is no longer the case as this “Bobcat” and “Bulldozer” information proves. Designed to scale to as low as 1 watt in power consumption, and designed from the ground up once again, you can expect AMD to aim this product at UMPC, phones and other appliance level devices.
Bring on “Falcon”, the first Fusion Product
Falcon is the name AMD has given to the first Fusion product family. Using the Bulldozer CPU core mentioned above, this platform will integrate the memory controller, CPU, GPU, cache and PCIe bridge into a single package; at least according to this slide.
Bulldozer is used once again here in the preview of the new server platform dubbed “Sandtiger”. Here multiple Bulldozer cores (up to 16 cores) are paired with a single memory controller.
